Some short films manage to compress the workings of an
entire feature narrative into just a few concise minutes. Many short films come
about as practice for the big feature, a trial run that can also be used as a means
to raise funds. That is the general feeling one has when watching Liliana
Greenfield-Sanders' “Adelaide,” a film that has the easygoing flow of an indie
narrative comedy and one that hits all the beats therein. But it's only about
12 minutes. One gets the sense that there is an even better feature lurking
within the framework and, according to Greenfield-Sanders, such a project could
conceivably happen. For now, viewers can treat themselves to a delightful sneak
preview of a film and still feel they've seen the basics of the whole story. In
the realm of short films, that is most certainly a compliment.

“Adelaide” fits in the indie rom-com mold and tells the
story of a woman in her early 20s, Adelaide (Anna Margaret Hollyman), who has
Munchausen Syndrome, a psychiatric disorder in which the person obsesses over
his or her health, caregiving and medically-related emergency situations. She
has only one friend, her doctor (Damian Young), who insists she find a more
appropriate best friend. On a routine trip to the pharmacy, she meets Brad
(Hank Harris), who works behind the counter and who is half-way through a book
called “The Caregiver's Book: Caring For Another, Learning to Care for Yourself.”
She decides right then and there that this is the man for her. She asks him out
and he does not turn her down. What follows is a rom-com staple—the montage of
their first dates and them getting to know each other—but with a refreshing
twist.

“Adelaide” works for many reasons, but the performances from
the two leads give the film its charm. As Adelaide, Hollyman projects a nice
confidence with a role that could have been played for easy laughs, but is
instead a complex and assured individual whose act of selflessness in the third
act is convincing and oddly romantic. Harris' role is not quite as developed,
but makes for a believable partner for her and thankfully does not spend a lot
of time questioning Adelaide's behavior and reasoning.

Greenfield-Sanders' film has a playfulness about it that evokes
Emily Hagins and Hal Hartley, but never feels like a pale imitation. Cinematographer
Peter O'Leary hardly ever moves the camera, staying mostly with nicely framed
static shots, which feels appropriate. The film has the feel of a quirky
comedy, but never goes for any cheap laughs. It has more charm than hilarity as
it aims to tell a story that suggests that there's someone out there for
everyone. More importantly, though, is the notion that there is enough here to
warrant a more intimate, complex and challenging feature film as both a
character study and an examination on Muchausen Syndrome in general.
Greenfield-Sanders demonstrates that she could easily tackle the serious
subject without force feeding her audience the usual beats of the average
disease film.

Have you ever met
someone like Adelaide? Is that what inspired this?

Not exactly. Or, more accurately, she’s not based on anyone
specific. I have been fascinated with Munchausen Syndrome for years, but most
of what’s been written on this syndrome are very clinical case-studies and
cautionary tales from doctors suggesting how to handle such patients. They tend
to paint their subjects in a consistent light: depressive, desperate, doomed to
a life of loneliness, incapable of reform and uncaring about much else but
their endless well of need. I chose the most difficult way to tell the story.
How can I make someone like this likable? Can this behavior be funny? Could a
person like this find her perfect match?

What I learned from audiences at over fifty film festivals
is that nearly everyone knows someone like Adelaide. I had no idea that would
be the case. It was liberating to find out that people connected with her or
felt that they knew someone “just like her” because it sent me into my feature
writing with the feeling that I could push the material further and darker as
long as it had heart.

How did you find your
cast?

Anna Margaret Hollyman and I are close friends. We’ve
collaborated on three shorts together and I wrote the character knowing she
would play Adelaide. It’s nearly impossible to convey how much I appreciate her
work on this film. In addition to her clear talent, which is on display
throughout, Anna Margaret was enthusiastic, dedicated and as generous as one
could ever hope an actress to be. She was available for all my meticulous
planning (my production books were a laughing matter at NYU and as thick as
“Janson’s History of Art”) and she signed up for a CPR course that I didn’t
even know she was taking. Her commitment was inspiring.

With Brad, I needed to find someone capable of matching Anna
Margaret (and her amazing subtlety and strangeness onscreen). He also needed to
fit one aesthetic criteria: I wanted him to look an unsettling amount Adelaide,
as if they could be brother and sister. I knew it would give the film an added
boost of subliminal creepiness, but it also made sense emotionally that this
character would fall for someone who felt like the family she longed for. We
auditioned so many actors, but I kept saying: “I want someone more like Hank
Harris from ‘Pumpkin.’” Finally my friend Rowan said, “Have you reached out to
Hank Harris yet? Enough already.” It hadn’t even occurred to me and I think
that’s because I decided in my head he would never be interested. Hank loved
the script, he said yes right away and was perfect in it.

Do you have any
production stories you'd like to share?

Two, if that’s okay. We shot in a real hospital and that was
a mistake. I went crazy pushing the city, calling hundreds of people, getting
clearances, rushing the shoot…and in the end, we used mostly close-ups because
Damian Young is so great. It could have been anywhere. Also, the sound was
shoddy because there were helicopters landing nearby with emergency patients
and people in the hallway to whom we obviously couldn’t stop and say, “Hey. I
know you’re having the worst day of your life, but we’re trying to shoot a Grad
Student film here…” Filmmakers always ask me to tell them how I landed a real
hospital room and recommend ways to do it. Let me be clear - fake it.

Second, the shot of Adelaide injecting a needle into her arm
was actually a cutaway of me dressed in her shirt injecting a real needle into
my arm. I think I was so sleep deprived, focused on making the film authentic
and “in charge” feeling that it didn’t even cross my mind that it was sort of a
weird move. We had a nurse on set for a later scene we were doing and I kind of
bullied her into supervising in case I shot air into my bloodstream or something
lovely like that. I sat down in the chair and said, “Okay. So, step one.
Sterilize right?” I think everyone on my crew was waiting for me to chicken out
and then when I plunged the needle into my arm, the script supervisor almost
threw up. I think that that’s when for the first time I thought, “this might
have been a bit inappropriate.” But we got a really cool shot and it sets up
the tone of the film perfectly. In retrospect, would I do it again? Yes.

Tell me about the
prospects of "Adelaide" as a feature film. Is it still in the works? What can you
tell us about it?

The feature is very different from the short - Adelaide is
younger, she’s whip-smart and she’s experiencing love for the first time. I
think it’s stronger than the short because it’s a little more grounded in
reality, but she’s just as intense and she goes much further to get what she
wants.

I’m definitely still committed to making the feature version
of “Adelaide.” I’m equally as committed to doing it the right way with the
right team. Perhaps that’s made it take a little longer. There are very few
coming-of-age stories for teenage girls that aren’t dystopian fantasies or
vampire-related. It’s important to me that this be done well and that what I
say with it is both fresh and unapologetic. No pressure right?

I sense a Hal Hartley
and maybe even a Wes Anderson influence here. Is that accurate? Who does influence you?

Some of the best advice I’ve ever received was: “When in
doubt, make your film feel like your main character directed it.” I love that
because it gives me license to approach every project differently. I give a lot
of thought to what I’m trying to make people feel and how best to achieve that.
With this short, I wanted to counterbalance the fact that she was inflicting
pain on herself with candy-colored aesthetics and upbeat music. I wanted the
audience to constantly be receiving cues that said, “Everything’s fine! You’re
enjoying this! Look! A montage!”

I am so flattered to be mentioned in the same sentence as
either of those directors (though I embarrassingly hadn’t seen Hal Hartley’s
work until after I made “Adelaide”). If I were to name directors that have had
a huge impact on my desire to become a writer and director, I’d say: Jonas
Mekas (for whom I volunteered for at Anthology Film Archives starting at age
eleven), Albert Maysles (who generously mentored me in college and even did an
interview for my first film, “Ghosts of Grey Gardens”), Mike Nichols, Elaine
May (she is the ultimate Goddess. I think there should be an Elaine May holiday
every year), Todd Haynes, Hal Ashby and Billy Wilder.

What's next for you?

I always have a few projects going at once. I’m writing some
television now (both an original pilot and projects for hire), which I’m
loving. Television really seems to be outpacing film with regards to hiring
women, which is both exciting and heartbreaking. I wish we could launch
ourselves out of the stone ages a lot more quickly in both of those landscapes.
I just make sure to write every day, work harder than I think is possible and
take time to check in with what I want.

Perspective is the easiest thing to lose in this industry,
so keeping aware of that is really important. If you do all those things,
hopefully whatever’s next won’t topple you, bad or good.

Editor's note: Scout Tafoya's latest edition of "The Unloved" might be my favorite installment to date, and not just because it breaks from the usual format and considers two films rather than concentrating on just one. It is an exercise in discovery, challenging conventional wisdom in the gentlest way. I like both "Heaven's Gate" and "The Lone Ranger" more than most critics (the last one notoriously more; follow the link and see). Plus, I tend to like Westerns, or at least find them interesting, even if parts of them don't work, because they're so rare these days, and for various reasons so demanding.

But I'd never considered the similarities that the two films share until I watched Scout's video.

There are a lot. And I mean a lot.

On a superficial level, both movies represented huge financial and artistic gambles. The commercial climate for Westerns was only slightly more hospitable in 1981, when "Heaven's Gate" came out, than in 2013, when director Gore Verbinski tried to revive the legend of the Masked Man. Both directors broke the bank making films audiences found confusing, irritating or tedious. "Heaven's Gate" was written off by critics and the handful of viewers who saw it as as an overlong, pompous, politically and dramatically incoherent example of '70s auteurism at its most indulgent. Its commercial failure nearly destroyed its studio. "The Lone Ranger" was rapped for its drastic tonal shifts, and for casting Verbinski regular Johnny Depp, whose claims of Native American ancestry have been disputed, as the Lone Ranger's friend and mentor, Tonto. But I always thought there was substance to the admittedly grandiose gestures of Cimino's epic. I fell in love with (some might say fell for) "The Lone Ranger" as well.

Even as a pre-film-literate middle schooler, I was fascinated by "Heaven's Gate" because it didn't look, feel or move like any Western I'd seen. It was long and slow and intensely physical (Cimino notoriously built entire towns with functioning interiors and exteriors, an indulgence that would't be permitted again until HBO bankrolled "Deadwood"). Also notable: the film was largely devoid of traditional gunfighter-movie cliches. It told the story of fully assimilated American whites oppressing more recent immigrants, a scenario few Hollywood films had shown us (not on this scale, anyway, or in the Old West; the closest thematic equivalent might have been first two "Godfather" films, or maybe Jan Troell's "The Immigrants"). Cimino's movie tried to show how the myth of Manifest Destiny was made real through sweat, blood and misery, mostly in the name of commerce. It showed an expansion undertaken mainly for the benefit of bankers, railway and mining companies, and at the expense of marginalized groups, specifically the suffering immigrants.

As Scout's video points out, "The Lone Ranger" has a heck of a lot of similarities to "Heaven's Gate," including a narrative of Manifest Destiny as capitalist nightmare (but with Native Americans rather than European immigrants being trampled upon). Its style is altogether more daring than Cimino's, which functioned mainly in a single mode (lavish tragedy). Verbinski's film starts out as a "Heaven's Gate" type exercise in myth-puncturing, with an aged Tonto relating the "real" story of the American west to a credulous 20th century boy in a Lone Ranger outfit. But because the whole thing is presented as a Native American's flashback, it seems less a refutation of lies than a counter-myth, to use Oliver Stone's great phrase. (Since I published this piece, a friend pointed out that you could see "The Lone Ranger" as the boy's memory of the story that Tonto told him—which makes it a story about a story about a story, and ultimately a film about history as storytelling: the "Grand Budapest Hotel" of action westerns, maybe?)

At any rate, "The Lone Ranger" is wild and elastic, a cantankerous old man's yarn about his youth. There are exaggerations, digressions, omissions, and flashes of perversity. We'll watch an outlaw cut a man's heart out of his chest or hear a recollection of a massacre and accept the horror at face value. But these scenes will be nestled beside examples of classically styled Hollywood spectacle (Verbinski stages some key scenes in Monument Valley, John Ford's old stomping grounds) or outrageous slapstick (the final locomotive chase is modeled on Buster Keaton's silent comedy "The General," and Helena Bonham Carter shows up as a frontier madam with a Gatling gun for a leg). Ford and Clint Eastwood's influence are accounted for, and there are flashes of Sergio Leone, Sam Raimi, Alejandro Jodorowsky and Laurel and Hardy. You could say it's all too much, and that a lot of it doesn't work, and you wouldn't be wrong. But like Cimino's movie, "The Lone Ranger" recombined its old elements into something ungainly yet fresh. No one with honest eyes could look at it and say, "Oh, no—not another one of these."

Nor was it possible to claim that the films had nothing in the heads, or on their minds. Nestled within the sooty nimbus of "Heaven's Gate" and the cartoon campfire glow of "The Lone Ranger" you'll find a pair of laments. As Scout puts it, "The films concern America's shameful treatment of immigrants and indigenous people, respectively. They couch their bloody histories in almost stifling artistry: a painter's grandiose vision of a land claimed for those apparently destined to have it. Both films fear the future, because with the brutality of an edit, happiness and progress become distant memories. Those who had it in them to make a difference were denied the chance by reality."--Matt Zoller Seitz

If anyone needed proof as to how beloved Leonard Nimoy was, all they would need to do was look at the Internet to witness the tributes to the man and his long career following the announcement of his passing today at the age of 83 from advanced pulmonary disease, which he was hospitalized for earlier in the week and which he attributed to a smoking habit that he had given up three decades earlier. These weren't just the normal acknowledgements of the death of a celebrity that one usually sees. These were deeper and more personal, as if someone close to them had died, and showed that to them, he and Spock, the eminently logical Vulcan that he portrayed to perfection on television and on the big screen in the immortal "Star Trek" series, were more than just an actor and a character--they were inspirations who helped to expand their horizons in regards to the possibilities of the world and beyond.

Born on March 26, 1931, Nimoy began acting in local community productions at the age of 8 and had his first major breakthrough at the age of 17 in a production of Clifford Odets' "Awake and Sing." He made his screen debut in 1951 with small roles in the comedies "Queen for a Day" and "Rhubarb" and made a memorable appearance as the alien Narab in the 1952 Republic Pictures serial "Zombies of the Stratosphere." After a hitch in the Army, he spent the next decade appearing in small roles in films such as "Them" (1954), "The Brain Eaters" (1958), and adaptations of two Jean Genet plays, "The Balcony" (1963) and "Deathwatch" (1966). During that time, he made appearances in any number of the popular television series of the time, including "Highway Patrol," "Sea Hunt," "Dragnet," "Bonanza," "Gunsmoke," "The Twilight Zone," ""The Outer Limits" and a 1964 episode of "The Man from U.N.C.L.E." in which he acted opposite another journeyman actor by the name of William Shatner.

In 1966, he would reunite with Shatner and make himself a permanent fixture in the pop culture firmament when he signed on to play the half-human, half-alien Spock in a new science-fiction series from Gene Roddenberry entitled "Star Trek." The history of that show has been documented in exhaustive detail over the years--how it limped through three years of middling ratings before getting cancelled in 1969, only to become a worldwide sensation through the constant reruns of the 79 episodes, several spin-off series and, after a rocky start, a hugely popular film franchise that continues on to this day. Although Spock, the science officer for the U.S.S. Enterprise, was famous for looking at things from a purely logical and emotion-free perspective, he would turn out to be the heart and soul of the franchise--while Shatner's Captain Kirk was off performing the usual heroic duties--fighting bad guys, romancing green-skinned babes and speechifying at length (and with more pauses than a Pinter play), Spock allowed viewers to look at the mysteries of space with a more curious and contemplative mindset.

Over the years, Nimoy would have a complex relationship with the character who gave him international fame. On the one hand, he clearly felt a close kinship with the character--it is said that he himself devised two of Spock's signature moves, the splayed-finger Vulcan salute and the nerve pinch that would knock out enemies instead of blasting them to bits. On the other hand, he would sometimes find it difficult to get people to see him as anything other than that character. He would supply Spock's voice for an animated "Star Trek" series that ran in the mid-Seventies but when rumors began to surface of a revival of the show proper, either on television or as a movie, there were rumors that he was not interested. In fact, when he wrote his autobiography in 1975, he famously titled it "I Am Not Spock."

During the immediate post-"Trek" era, he was a regular during the last two seasons of "Mission: Impossible," served as the host of the oddball documentary series "In Search Of. . . " and made guest appearances on a number of other television shows. He also appeared on the stage in a number of productions and even recorded five albums, the second of which, 1967's "Two Sides of Leonard Nimoy," featured the "Hobbit"-inspired tune "The Ballad of Bilbo Baggins." In 1978, he would give one of his most notable non-"Trek" performances in Philip Kaufman's great remake of "Invasion of the Body Snatchers"--as self-help guru Dr. David Kibner, he brilliantly spoofed his persona as a man of logic talking people out of what proved to be very well-founded paranoias about how there is something not quite right with their loved ones. With all due respect to the other versions, this "Body Snatchers" is the best of the bunch in the way that it blends horror and social satire and Nimoy's performance does a lot to sell both approaches.

Finally, after years of wrangling, "Star Trek" would finally return as a feature film and Nimoy agreed to return as Spock. The end result of all this work and anticipation was "Star Trek-The Motion Picture" (1979), a bloated behemoth of a film that satisfied few (though when director Robert Wise was afforded the chance to recut it years later for home video, that version did play somewhat better) but made enough money to warrant a sequel that would be produced on a much smaller scale. Nimoy was even less eager than before to come back--during this time, he had directed a film version of his one-man play "Vincent" (1981), in which he played Theo van Gogh, and gave an Emmy-nominated performance opposite Ingrid Bergman (in her last role) in the mini-series "A Woman Called Golda"--but agreed to come back with the promise that Spock would be killed off once and for all. Against all odds, this sequel, "Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan" (1982) would prove to be a critical and commercial hit and the scene in which Spock gives his life to save the crew of the Enterprise would prove to be a devastating punch in the gut at the end of its hugely entertaining story--the power of Spock's final moments with his friend Kirk were such that even those who had never seen "Star Trek" before were moved by it.

Of course, the end of "The Wrath of Khan" gave hints that Spock might somehow be resurrected and once the film was released, "Star Trek III: The Search for Spock" went into production. This time around, Nimoy asked for the chance to direct and was hired, the first time a member of the "Trek" cast was hired to work behind the camera as well. When the film was released in 1984, it proved to be another hit and the climactic resurrection of Spock was the Easter Sunday to the previous film's Good Friday. Not only was Spock reborn, Nimoy now had a new career on his hand as a director--over the next few years, he would make "Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home" (1986), the most popular installment of the franchise to date at the time, the very successful "Three Men & A Baby" (1987), the melodrama "The Good Mother" (1988), the grisly Gene Wilder comedy "Funny About Love" (1990) and the barely-released 1994 Patricia Arquette vehicle "Holy Matrimony."

His association with the "Trek" franchise would continue with "Star Trek V: The Final Frontier" (1989), "Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country" (1991), an appearance on television's "Star Trek: The Next Generation" and cameos in the J.J. Abrams franchise reboots "Star Trek" (2009) and "Star Trek: Into Darkness" (2013)--to solidify his new-found bond with the character, he would title his 1995 autobiography "I Am Spock." Outside of the "Trek" universe, he would continue to make the occasional guest appearances--oftentimes as a voice actor and usually in genre-related projects. He supplied voices to characters in the animated feature "Transformers: The Movie" (1986) and the live-action cartoon "Transformers: Dark of the Moon" (2011) as well as the Disney "Atlantis: The Lost Empire" (2001). On television, he played himself on episodes of "The Simpsons" and "Futurama," appeared as a recurring character on the cult sci-fi show "Fringe" and even gave voice to a Spock action figure on "The Big Bang Theory"--all shows that could trace their lineage in some way back to "Star Trek." Not counting voice work and cameos, Nimoy essentially retired from acting in 2003.

Leonard Nimoy had a fascinating life, both on and off the screen, and it is impossible to gauge just how influential he and his work have been on subsequent generations. I am not just talking about the members of the show's immediate fan base who have memorized every episode and attend the conventions dressed in their fake ears and arched eyebrows. After all, who knows how many people who watched him as Spock while growing up were inspired by his ideal to themselves go into the scientific and technological fields as a result? Nimoy wasn't just a star--he was an icon in the best sense of the word and his passing will leave a void with everyone whom he touched with his craft over the years. Of course, to quote a film that presumably does not need to be named, "He's not really dead, as long as we remember him."

Nothing brings a couple back together quite like a murder mystery. Two minds, being better than one, must find a way to put aside long-simmering tensions and jealousies, differences and anxieties, to solve something bigger than the both of them. For even the most healthy relationship that can pose a challenge, not to mention the more tangible danger of a murderer being on the loose.

Such is the comedic premise in Lawrence Michael Levine’s "Wild Canaries," a snappy rom-com sweetly infused with the tropes of detective mysteries. When an engaged Brooklyn couple, Barri (Sophia Takal) and Noah (Levine) are shocked to find their dead neighbor, Barri becomes suspicious of the neighbor’s creepy son, Anthony (Kevin Corrigan), who could have made a lot of money in a life insurance policy. She begins to unravel a larger mystery that involves their landlord Damien (Jason Ritter), his failing marriage and weird post-modern art, and a framed murder gone awry. She finds little to no support in her fiance Noah and turns instead to her best friend and roommate Jean (Alia Shawkat) for support and investigating assistance.

In many narrative respects, "Canaries" is essentially an update to "Manhattan Murder Mystery," Woody Allen’s probing but spry psychological exploration into spousal jealousy featuring an older version of Barri and Noah, placed one burrough over, Carol (Diane Keaton) and Larry Lipton (Allen). Visually, the films couldn’t be further apart. "Manhattan" is shot atypically for Allen, relying almost exclusively on handheld but mostly immobile medium long takes that contain the characters in their small apartments. "Canaries" frequently employs close-ups, zooms and sly edits for comedic effect, rapidly cutting to say, Noah’s frantic facial expression as he’s almost caught snooping—all of this, accompanied by the film’s cheesy but jarring music, results in a unique, pulpy hilarity. But the films also share substantial thematic similarities. They demonstrate how the comforts, safety and sanity required in a long-term relationship can be challenged by the human desire to intuit and probe into something deep and mysterious—such as a friend’s inexplicable death—all of which requires radical thinking and courage.

In both films, this bravery of spirit comes from the female characters, Barri and Carol, who repeatedly risk their lives—breaking into houses, spying on people until they find credible evidence, or, finally, stalking murderers into sticky situations—but such actions actually cause less damage to their relationship than the fact that they challenge their partners to humour their wild ideas in the first place. Both women become so obsessive in speculation that they drive their partners crazy. In each film, the male partner argues: Wasn’t the deceased neighbor an old woman? How could anyone possibly fake a heart attack? What are the chances of their neighbor being a murderer? It’s immediately observable that the female partner, being the more intuitive half, is not only smarter in preternaturally picking up on weird vibes, but also blessed with the bravery to investigate.

The former trait is a gendered idea, that these characters are onto something simply by having “female intuition” and feeling it so strongly they’re compelled to continue questioning the circumstances instead of dropping the matter. Both films are complicated in their gender depictions, but at the very least, no one gets to play the hero. None of the characters are actually talented at playing detective, and solving the mystery requires a high degree of collaboration from both partners, as well as a few close friends who further complicate their dynamic and arouse jealousy. Both men are emasculated through the journey: Allen’s long-established neuroticisms and cowardice come to the fore whenever Carol leads him into a potentially dangerous situation, and Noah suffers one physical injury after another, rendering him all but impotent. In both films, it’s imperative that at some point, Larry and Noah succumb to the substantial evidence their partners have unearthed and actually help them, lack of courage or a functioning neck be damned.

In both films, these male egos are also encouraged to help upon the realization that they might be losing their partners. Noah and Larry are both jealous of their partners’ friends, who are perfectly capable and eager to help them out, to the point of suspecting infidelity. It doesn’t help that the friends in both cases—Jean in "Canaries," Ted (Alan Alda) in "Manhattan"—are incredibly supportive of Barri and Carol’s inquests, that they’re there to answer phone calls and ruminate at three in the morning and beyond, and that they seem to possess a savviness that makes them better suited for the mystery than Noah or Larry. It doesn’t help that both Jean and Ted harbor crushes for their female friends.

But in both films, Noah and Larry have potential love interests of their own: Marcia Fox (Anjelica Huston) is the bad-ass poker player and Larry’s client who comes up with the brilliant bluffing scheme that ultimately nails the murderer. In "Canaries," Noah’s ex-girlfriend and colleague Eleanor (Annie Parisse) tries to seduce him with a massage, but he ends up developing a crick in his neck. He resists the temptation, though he agrees with her that his fiancee is a child (this is undeniably true, for all of Barri’s virtues). Yet Eleanor is also the one who ends up coming with a risky but ingenious scheme to nail the murderer. It’s perhaps unsurprising, then, that in both films Barri and Carol become incredibly jealous and defensive of these schemes—which their partners, who never seemed to care before, suddenly fully endorse—and are suddenly wary of trying to help nab the killers.

Older rom-com murder mysteries like "The Thin Man" and "The Ex-Mrs. Bradford" operated under different gender dynamics. "Thin Man" didn’t intend Nick Charles’ (William Powell) temporary return to detective work to wreak havoc on his relationship with Nora (Myrna Loy). Their frequently drunken raillery serves as the light and sassy counterpoint to the terse mystery at hand, and Nick’s involvement in finding the missing Thin Man only prevents him from imbibing as much as he would like to with his lady. But the film was made over 80 years ago, when relationship woes in comedies were frequently scrubbed clean of such self-serious tension, and fictional female detectives were few and far between.

It should also be noted that it is the sensible Nora’s suggestion that Nick provide his professional expertise, yet her interest in the case doesn’t cease once he takes up the cause. One of the more damning (though admittedly funny) moments in the film occurs when Nick tricks her into getting a cab. Ostensibly he will join her to investigate his new lead of information; however, he quickly shuts the door and sends her to Grant's tomb. The murder does pose danger to Nick and Nora, but only in a real sense, when a suspect tries to shoot him at their residence and Nick is forced to make the split-second decision to punch out Nora in order to save her from the line of fire. All of these attempts to quash Nora’s curiosity are some of the worst and most dated elements in a film that is otherwise quite delightful.

In William Powell’s other rom-com murder mystery, "The Ex-Mrs. Bradford," which came out only two years later, he stars as Dr. Lawrence Bradford, a surgeon-cum-detective who divorces Mrs. Paula Bradford (Jean Arthur) because her intense curiosity kept dragging him into solving murder mysteries and he simply couldn’t handle the drama. This being a comedy of remarriage makes it closer to the contemporary films, as the mystery is the driving force that reunites the couple. But it’s also more similar to "Manhattan" and "Canaries" in that Paula is the curious catalyst and genuinely a boon to the investigation (even if she must leave a lot of the dirty work up to her ex-husband). The tension is thicker here than in "Thin Man," and Paula’s overactive imagination makes her talented at both sniffing out real clues and seeing things that aren’t there, like when she’s startled by the butler setting up Lawrence’s hidden film projector. Like the more recent films, the couple’s teamwork is challenged by inefficiencies, like when she goes to help Lawrence fight off an intruder and accidentally knocks him out instead of the bad guy—somehow, she manages to make this mistake more than once, and even more unbelievably, they survive the ordeal and remarry.

The highly intuitive female character is a convention that can be found even in Alfred Hitchcock’s work, particularly his last film, the underrated "Family Plot," in which the film pays teasing homage to the trope by making Blanche (Barbara Harris) a psychic. Falling right smack in between the release dates of the 1930s comedies and the more recent films, "Plot" is unique in that it introduces more than one relationship dynamic. There’s Blanche and George (Bruce Dern), both of whom are quite intent on solving the mystery of a missing man, the long-lost heir of Blanche’s client who has promised her money to find him. The second relationship in the film includes the missing heir, a certain Arthur Adamson (William Devane) who faked a new identity after disguising his death as Edward Shoebridge, and his partner in crime, Fran (Karen Black). Having secretly murdered his adoptive parents years ago, Arthur likes to kidnap rich men and steal their diamonds in order to bolster his jewelry shop. His scheming is dependent on the help of his wife, who becomes increasingly wary of their illegal shenanigans throughout the movie. Their relationship-heavy dialogue underscores the thematic connection between crime and love and the sexuality inherent in risky behaviour, in which the definition of intimacy is expanded to include such fun activities as committing murder together.

Blanche and George’s relationship is not exactly rosy, either, but their rows typically revolve around their financial desperation to solve the mystery. The rich jewel-thief couple sneer at their domestic disputes, but in the end Blanche and George triumph over the criminal lovebirds. It’s not unlike the endings of "Manhattan" and "Canaries," where the murders originally start off with a couple wanting to steal money before one partner eventually double-crosses the other. These films all seem to be suggesting the same sage idea: love is better served in solving a murder together than committing one.

The filmmaker compacts the storyline a bit. You're not seeing a point-by-point or shot-by-shot re-creation of the scenes, but an account of their boldest gestures. It's the gestures that jump out at you; they make you realize that classic movie scenes often come down to little things that people do with their faces or bodies.

I didn't realize, for example, that you can boil down the dramatic importance of that entire woodchipper sequence in "Fargo" to one gesture, Marge pointing to the badge on her hat.

I also didn't realize how little detail was necessary to evoke the climactic sequence of "Se7en." The shots are vividly composed, with stark. flat colors and an overwhelming brightness, but in the end they're really defined by the outlines of human bodies on horizon lines, sometimes accompanied by electrical towers or power lines slashing across negative space.

The little directorial flourishes are also lovely. Watch for the shot at the 1:00 mark in Damian's version of the "Ferris Bueller " clip, when the "camera" booms past the "actors" to reveal the wrecked "car"below the house. I didn't really appreciate what a magnificent shot this is until Damian re-drew it in black, white and red.

Clark Terry, the subject of 2014's excellent "Keep on Keepin' On" has passed away at the age of 94. As detailed in the documentary, Terry played with some of the most legendary jazz musicians of all time, including Duke Ellington, Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk, and Quincy Jones, who he helped mentor to fame.H e would never quite become a household name, but he would win a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award and influence hundreds of people in his art. As Herbie Hancock says in the documentary, "When you hear Clark, you hear his life. Only a master can do that."

"Keep On Keepin' On" also details CT's (as his friends would call him) relationship with a blind piano prodigy named Justin Kauflin. Instead of just achieving master status in his craft, Terry passed what he knew on to the generations below him. We send our condolences to his friends and family.

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tag:www.rogerebert.com,2005:BlogPost/54eb45dfcd3b56365900005e2015-02-23T09:28:00-06:002015-03-01T11:38:18-06:00“Evil Against Evil”: The Fascinating Incoherence of American SniperNiles Schwartz

Clint Eastwood’s "American Sniper" has become only the second R-rated movie to gross $300 million at the U.S. box office. The cause for its success is attributed to how it’s attracted, as Michael Moore puts it, the “Passion of the Christ crowd,” in reference to Mel Gibson’s 2004 Jesus film, the other R-rated $300 million earner with an attributed Red State following. But while a film about Chris Kyle, the late Navy SEAL from Texas who racked up over 160 confirmed kills during four tours in Iraq, could be dismissed as pro-war propaganda laced with the irresistible money magnet ingredients of jingoism and violent sadism (at least that’s how its critics seem to paint the picture), "American Sniper" has significant similarities with—when we adjust inflation—two much more successful Restricted films. Like "The Godfather," Eastwood’s latest not only is about a killer the audience perceives as a hero and family man, but the journey Chris Kyle (Bradley Cooper) and his wife Taya (Sienna Miller) take through the film has the disconcerting mien of something uncanny, and in examining a nation’s agonized mythos, it’s closer to "The Exorcist" than "Lone Survivor" or "Saving Private Ryan." "American Sniper" is a perplexing riddle of valor on an incoherent battlefield, following a character—and an ideology—who believes in good and evil but whose actions embody the enigmatic words of an Iraqi curator studying the satanic artifact meant to ward off evil spirits in "The Exorcist"’s prologue: “Evil against evil.”

Given its fractured psychology, "American Sniper" resists a coherent message, which has enabled the controversy surrounding it. This year’s Oscar race handily played with neat binary categorizations, as "Selma" and "American Sniper" were set up as opposing political movies from the left and right, as if to echo the (unfair) divide between "Coming Home" and "The Deer Hunter" in 1978. Media hoopla nurtured the reductionism as a recent lawsuit involving Jesse Ventura and a New Yorker piece suggest that the real life Kyle may have been something of a Munchausen telling tall tales of heroic exploits to bolster his growing legend, and so less a true grit “Clint” archetype than Richard Harris’ English Bob, the railroad-hired mercenary followed by a biographer who writes whatever the gunslinger tells him, in "Unforgiven." The clamorous applause of conservatives like Sarah Palin doesn’t help, as meanwhile the film becomes a think-piece generator for progressives. In Rolling Stone, Matt Taibbi likens "American Sniper" to "Forrest Gump," “a simple, well-lit little fairy tale with the nutritional value of a fortune cookie that serves up a neatly-arranged helping of cheers and tears for target audiences, and panics at the thought of embracing more than one or two ideas at any time.”

While Taibbi is correct to liken Chris Kyle, in real-life or in "American Sniper"’s dramatic representation, to the “Stay the Course” bubble worldview of George W. Bush, it’s harder to do so for the film itself (Taibbi’s sense of Eastwood as a director of empty calorie fortune cookies also suggests he has a very different impression of "Bird," "Unforgiven," "Mystic River," "Million Dollar Baby," "Letters from Iwo Jima" than I do, but whatever). At the heart of the film is a push and pull of clarion American landscapes with core values handed down by the father set against tempestuous disorder and doubt, with Chris’ eyes trying to catch a white horse running through the night, and where a sandstorm, following a “Mission Accomplished” proclamation, makes it impossible for the viewer to distinguish between American and Iraqi. In this sense, it is a Bush Jr. movie, but in the same way Eastwood’s troubling though fascinating misfire "J. Edgar" (with its own invented white horse) mirrored its subject as an incomplete film, complementing its titular incomplete Machine Man played by Leonardo DiCaprio.

Like "J. Edgar," which also caught the ire of progressives (as it’s a somewhat sympathetic film about an architect of American fascism), "American Sniper" is often defined by its conspicuous omissions. Hoover says to one of his many biographical ghostwriters who inquires about specifics, “Let’s leave that to the reader’s imagination. The important thing is drawing the line between protagonist and antagonist.” It’s a line that connects with a recurring Eastwood theme of black and white hats, but I think it gives more insight into Hoover’s mindset—and our nation’s mythology rooted in Eastwood’s embryotic Western mileau—than Eastwood’s. (Again, as if he’s never really considered the implications of "Unforgiven" or Eastwood’s "Iwo Jima" movies, Taibbi writes, “The characters in Eastwood’s movies almost always wear white and black hats or their equivalents, so you know at all times who’s the good guy on the one hand, and whose exploding head we’re to applaud on the other.”) The tone of suffusing dread Eastwood wrangles in "American Sniper," like the eerie blankness in "J. Edgar," makes such topical absences (the Iraq dead, WMDs, the policy of the Bush cabinet) feel more like repression than jingoistic whitewashing, encapsulated with an image of Chris returning home amongst servicemen’s caskets, something the Bush White House didn’t want photographers to publish.

The link between the two films is repression, which ties into the startling transgressive sense that "American Sniper" could be read as what the late Marxist critic Robin Wood defined as an “Incoherent Text.” The idea is a throwback to Eastwood’s heyday of the 1970s, when Classical Hollywood had collapsed. Wood writes, “There are two keys to understanding the development of the Hollywood cinema in the 70s: the impingement of Vietnam on the national consciousness and the unconscious, and the astonishing evolution of the horror film.” The war led to doubts about patriarchal guidelines, “the symbolic figure of the Father in all its manifestations,” while motifs of the horror genre began to permeate and undermine all facets of the era’s cinema, Wood focusing on three key motifs: the monster-as-human-psychopath who is a product of “normality”; the descent-into-hell; and the doppelganger. While art strives to make coherent meaning out of human experience, the maker of the “incoherent text” perceives the chaos that art represses and reorders. With these films, meaning is defeated. Built on Classical foundations of meaning, the films are fracturing as they play out before us. They’re bewildering, and “they are works that do not know what they want to say.”

I can’t say authoritatively that Wood would read "American Sniper" as an incoherent text any more than I can affirm Clint Eastwood would nod in approval to having his work interpreted through the prism of Marxist theory, and many others might have a hard time believing “one take Clint” as a transgressive artist (though that certainly would explain the whole Invisible Obama In A Chair fiasco at the 2012 RNC). But "American Sniper," while classical enough to satisfy millions of middle American viewers and infuriate others, seems in its very design to function through schizophrenic entropy, its narrative of violent stalwart heroism riddled with cancerous doubts that malignantly enfold it. The young Chris Kyle, aimless as a rodeo cowboy, is framed through a door like Ethan Edwards in "The Searchers" (which Wood calls one of the definitive incoherent texts). He’s led to war not so much by patriotism as by rage (“You’re pissed off,” the recruiting official says as the 30-year-old Kyle, somewhat past his prime, enlists following the 1998 U.S. embassy bombings). Jason Hall’s screenplay assigns him a doppelganger, Mustafa, a maneuver that is as structurally egregious as it is disarmingly meaningful in showing how the Chris Kyle worldview requires a villain who is a repressive mirror exemplifying the shortcomings of the Father’s strict but hollow categories (in "Sniper," Chris’ father sternly lists them as sheep, wolves, and sheep dogs) that deny agency to other people (and races or nations); as Wood writes of homophobia in (the characters of) William Friedkin’s controversial Cruising, the “savage” that Chris Kyle hates is the unacknowledged “savage” within himself—and his country.

After the father initiates Kyle into America’s culture of guns, God, and rigid categories, his absence from the rest of the narrative denotes a pronounced disintegration of authoritative validity. It’s as markedly eerie as the presence of the fake robotic baby in Chris’ arms as he squabbles with Taya between tours. Much blabber has surrounded this conspicuous prop, used as ammunition by the film’s attackers who like to condescend its presumed ideology, and while the excuse is one of Eastwood’s on-set just-shoot-it methodology (there were problems with the real baby), the fact that Mustafa seems to have progeny from the same plastic toy manufacturer further effuses the whole movie with an off-note but purposeful dissonance, a sense of invasion and possession, especially when we look at Chris’ affectless eyes while talking to his wife. Just earlier while pregnant, she says to Chris on the phone, “I have an alien growing inside of me,” a line of jokey marital rapport, but in the full context of "American Sniper" it moves us out of familiar Over There War Movie territory and into the foreboding sleepless zone of devil spawn Vietnam/Nixon era horror, as varied as "Rosemary’s Baby," "The Omen," "The Exorcist," and "It’s Alive."

In contrast to his own father, new dad Chris is a hero writhing between the western and horror film, protector of a hellish town and committed to the Law of the Father, but he’s also a manufactured product of sorts, a killing machine produced by a system that’s gradually losing its credibility (as expressed in characters surrounding Chris, like his shell-shocked brother, exasperated and anxious wife, frustrated superiors, and fellow servicemen who’ve lost their faith in the Iraq mission—all elements glossed over by Eastwood’s critics). As Robin Wood describes the relationship between Ethan Edwards in "The Searchers" and Travis Bickle in "Taxi Driver," we could include a description of Eastwood’s Chris Kyle, the central incoherence here in “the failure to establish a consistent, and adequately rigorous, attitude to the protagonist.” After Travis’ “heroic” assault on a pimp’s den, we realize this New York Hell will nevertheless remain execrable, just as Iraq, after “Mission Accomplished” (Mustafa’s death, and certainly the larger picture of U.S. foreign policy) will sink deeper into hell. Ethan Edwards, Travis Bickle, and the fictional Chris Kyle remain the Hero, though with unresolved thorns of ambivalence following us out of the theater and into our myriad think pieces.

"American Sniper" begins exactly as "The Exorcist" does—with the call of “Allahu Akbar” in Iraq. This cloaks both films with a veil of suspect xenophobia, but on examination it really expresses a condition of despair as applied to the Western protagonists that also interrogates us as moviegoers. In "The Exorcist," matters of the eternal are taken very seriously by the Iraqi Muslims. They are conscious of Good and Evil in a way that the First World citizens dwelling Georgetown are not. It’s not any allegiance to the devil that brings Satan into the household of Ellen Burstyn and her daughter (Linda Blair), but secular acquiescence and apathy. What’s significant is that director William Friedkin and writer William Peter Blatty show how similarly weighty issues are trivialized by the medium in which they’re working, motion pictures. Burstyn plays a Hollywood actress who’s relocated with her daughter to Georgetown for a movie that seems to be about social unrest on college campuses, but processed as mere entertainment it’s humorously dismissed by Burstyn’s character as “Walt Disney’s version of the Ho Chi Minh story.” The film meanwhile works as a horror film because of how the supernatural fractures Friedkin’s verisimilitudinous universe, the abrasiveness stealing us away from entertainment where Good and Evil are mere abstractions. By the conclusion, “God is Great” means something, even if the war between Good and Evil is unresolved and mysterious. Satan is cast out (really moving from one vessel to another), but the safe confines of secular America with its movie houses and luxuries no longer feel safe. Georgetown becomes uncanny, familiar and yet as removed as the prologue’s Iraq.

In "American Sniper," “Allahu Akbar” is followed by the epitome of profane destruction, a tank. As it moves through a Fallujah warzone and Chris readies his aim on a woman and child preparing an RPG to kill U.S. troops, we have a chilling mural of "The Exorcist"’s “evil against evil.” Eastwood cuts from the moment before Chris will have his first confirmed kills to his childhood in Texas, a landscape of blue skies, well kept yards, and amber waves of grain. It’s racially homogenic and tightly structured with the stern but encouraging authority of Chris’ father, who takes the boy hunting (where Chris will kill his first deer, and warned to never leave his rifle in the dirt) and presides over affairs as values are handed down, namely the apologetics of St. Paul in the Book of Acts, where the new Christians spread the gospel and balance the divine authority of Christ with that of Caesar, and the three distinct categories of men.

The flashback functions as a defense mechanism for someone who must necessarily enact evil to stop it. He falls back on the knowledge of Good and Evil, even though the divide between the two was more important that examining the possibility of co-existence. Chris, who steals a bible from church (but never seems to open it), and beats the hell out of a schoolyard bully, is anointed with the binary but has no tools to process it. His brand of justice is a form of righteousness that follows him into adulthood. There’s no deliberation, dialogue, or inquiry. He’s impelled by rage, as if the role of sheep dog gives him the right to become a wolf at the right moment. His beastliness is given fuel and vented with the schoolyard bully, his unfaithful girlfriend and her lover, and finally by terrorist acts. He was bestowed a cowboy ideology, but as he competes in a rodeo, the bleachers feel empty.

What’s so tragic about "American Sniper" is that terrorism once more gives meaning to discredited and decaying ideology, the sheep-dog representatives of which follow like sheep. We may dislike Eastwood’s Kyle or sympathize for him deeply. But the human treatment the director and Bradley Cooper give him is heart wrenching because it puts a face on the faceless, murderous foot soldier, which is a conversation about warfare few people, of any political wing, is comfortable having. And while Eastwood gives his accusers fuel by presenting Mustafa in eye-catching black wardrobe and matching stubble, is his representation any more monstrous than the menacing death-signifying skulls on U.S. tanks, or Chris’ gradual metamorphosis into an Angel of Death, not unlike Eastwood’s William Munny from Unforgiven (or for that matter “Preacher” from Pale Rider)?

The media rabble around the film fires back and forth about Chris Kyle as hero and monster, a problem Eastwood cannot solve but shows us in "American Sniper"’s final scene, as Chris flirtatiously mimics a black hat from Western moviedom while pointing a gun at Taya, and at his daughter’s request imitates a frightening bear. The latter impression loudly recalls Marlon Brando’s final scene in "The Godfather," a fortuitous bit of improvisation the great actor wrought in order to accomplish the scene with an uncooperative child actor. Vito Corleone, another “American Hero” who molded a murderous reputation born of trying to protect his family, plays the part of menacing monster with his grandson before collapsing of a fatal heart attack. Whether deliberate or not (like the mystery of Eastwood’s fake baby), the metaphor is powerful: the godfather dies like he lived, as a monster, a tragic cycle repeated by his son Michael, whose entropy parallels Chris Kyle’s decisive, but necessary, first kill.

As a consequence of real life, "American Sniper"’s rehabilitation of Chris, where he gradually overcomes the PTSD that he’s been rejecting by reaching out to physically wounded veterans, is tragically overwhelmed by the horrific return of the repressed. I regret that sounds like a trivialization of an actual tragedy, but the film’s conclusion is, for me, an all-too-appropriate way to express the insoluble character of America’s last 15 years, with its rampant and contradictory foreign invasions coupled with disengaged psychological hermeticism. Chris Kyle says goodbye to his wife and children before taking a young vet with PTSD to a gun range, where we know the young man will—inexplicably—shoot Chris. Taya’s perspective of the mysterious young man waiting for Chris by a truck is one of the most unsettling images in recent memory, the film’s third angel of death recognized by the knowing audience, or perhaps another doppelganger heralding a terrifying psychosis we/Chris/America cannot snap out of. Eastwood again invokes The Godfather, as the husband’s enigma and burrowed sins walk away from the gaze of a long suffering wife, the closing door blotting her out from what calls him away.

"American Sniper"’s success stands on contradictions, but in that sense it recalls its R-rated cultural phenom forebears; "The Godfather" films were intended to be a criticism of capitalism by Francis Ford Coppola, but that hasn’t stopped it from being adored and emulated by everyone from Ayn Randians to U.S. foreign policy analysts (as Tom Hanks’ mega-successful entrepreneur calls it in Nora Ephron’s "You’ve Got Mail," it’s the I Ching). As for "American Sniper," which oscillates between its protagonist being a hero and murderer, the epilogue consisting of media footage of Chris’ funeral feels like the single note of hagiographic excess that throws a marked criticism of the film’s subject off track. But it reinforces the film’s incoherent design and makes it forcefully haunting. Nothing, within the film’s American ideology, feels resolvable, and so the film feels like the antithesis of what it’s alleged to be by detractors.

My theatrical experiences of "American Sniper" remind me of Seth Rogen’s publicized tweet, likening the film to “Nation’s Pride,” the fictional Joseph Goebbels propaganda film from "Inglourious Basterds." It’s an ironic statement, as I was one of the very few who caught Rogen’s own holiday war film, "The Interview," in a sold out theater on Christmas Day. I confess to liking it quite a lot, but the crowd was incessantly laughing and cheering as North Korea’s brass met violent death, Kim Jong-Un’s demise leading to particularly clamorous applause: it was a replication of Tarantino’s Parisian theater screening of “Nation’s Pride.” On the other hand, I repeatedly hear how nothing but somber audience silence follows "American Sniper." It supplants "Unforgiven" to become Eastwood’s last Western, but without the chiaroscuro buffer of genre, instead hurling us into evenly lit recent events a lot of us have resisted and repressed. There’s no catharsis following the kill shots, only a nonsensical and inexorable abyss.

Editor's note: This is the eighth in a series of videos about the films of Wes Anderson, written and narrated by me, and produced in collaboration with my regular editor and filmmaking partner Steven Santos. The books were illustrated by Max Dalton and designed by Martin Venezsky, artists showcased in the videos along with stills and production material from Anderson's movies. You can view the rest of the videos, plus interviews and more, by clicking here.

The narration is drawn from the following introduction to The Wes Anderson Collection: The Grand Budapest Hotel, which you can order here. For more details about this book and its predecessor, The Wes Anderson Collection, click here.

“We were happy here. For a little
while.”

—Zero Moustafa

All of Wes Anderson’s films are
comedies, and none are. There is always a melancholic undertone, buried
just deep enough beneath artifice and artistry that you don’t see it
right away.

Such is
the case with The Grand Budapest Hotel,
his eighth and most structurally ambitious movie. After a first viewing, you
come away remembering the wit and motion, and wit in motion, of this tale within a tale within a tale.
A dowager countess is murdered, a foppish concierge named Gustave is framed and
imprisoned, a nation is plunged into war as fascism’s specter looms, but these
dire events are cushioned by colors, textures, and madcap chases.

When you recall
the film, you quote the quotable lines: “She was dynamite in the sack, by the
way.” “I apologize on behalf of the hotel.” “May I
offer any of you inmates a plate of mush?” You envision farcical set pieces:
the normally unflappable Gustave trying to escape the cops sent to arrest him
by turning tail and sprinting; the Rube Goldberg-esque prison break, complete
with tools hidden in pastries, a seemingly endless rope ladder, and the
rhythmic tapping of hammers on bars; Gustave and his lobby boy Zero on a
bobsled, chasing the assassin Jopling down a tree-lined slalom. You savor the details of costuming, special
effects, set design, and cinematography: the pink hotel; the funicular; Madame
D.’s Marie Antoinette-by-way-of-Elsa-Lanchester hairdo; a dresser-top packed with
Gustave’s signature scent, L'Air de Panache; Jopling’s skull-shaped knuckle-dusters;
those exquisite pastries in those exquisite boxes; the way the frame changes
shape, depending on where you are in the story.

The whole
film is further buoyed not just by a sense of invention, but reinvention. The heroes
are people who have re-created themselves, or tried to. Madame D., weighed down
by propriety and matriarchal responsibility and memories of youthful vigor,
escapes into fantasy with Gustave, the only person in her life who treated her
tenderly in her dotage, and wills him the painting that (eventually) changes
his life, as well as Zero’s. The inmates, incarcerated for all manner of
crimes, escape prison alongside Gustave, then pile into a taxi and disappear
into the wider world. Agatha, an apprentice baker, becomes an action heroine,
helping her love retrieve 'Boy with Apple'
at great risk to herself. We never find out the details of Gustave’s history,
but we don’t need to. We see through his cultivated façade each time he
intersperses his coy “darling”s with expletives or momentarily (sometimes
tactically) forgets to be a gentleman. The L'Air de Panache stands in for his
persona: The man has perfumed his entire life.

But with each successive viewing, a funny, really not-so-funny thing happens: The veil of
lightness lifts to reveal a film that would be unbearably sad if it weren’t cushioned
by comedy and dolled up with spectacle. You find yourself dreading the moments
of darkness more acutely: Joplin hacking off Deputy Kovacs’s fingers via
sliding metal door; Zero in black-and-white, taking a rifle butt across the
face; darling Agatha marrying Zero on a mountaintop as old Zero informs us that
she, and their infant son, died two years later of the Prussian grippe. As you watch and re-watch, the film’s wit
and motion never recede completely, but you may feel a pang as you realize that,
like so many Wes Anderson pictures, The
Grand Budapest Hotel is about loss, and how we come to terms with loss—or
never do.

Say
the film’s title again after a second or third viewing, and the emblematic
image becomes the face of old Zero, a man so shattered by the losses of his
best friend and his great love that he can’t bear to describe their demises in
detail. He allocates just six words to Gustave’s execution at the hands of
“pockmarked fascist assholes,” a moment pictured in plain-facts black-and-white
that makes him a part of history before he can become history: “In the end, they shot him.” Agatha’s death gets
three sentences, one of which describes the illness that killed her as “An
absurd little disease.” De nada, it’s
nothing; and now, we try to move on.

The
most important parts of a story are the parts people omit, the abysses they
sidestep. Zero gifts the Author with details about Gustave, the hotel, the
country, the war, and various colorful supporting characters; in so doing, he hands
the young visitor a legacy that transforms him into a legacy himself: a beloved
author treasured by his nation. But Zero is not an open book. Whenever he’s
about to lose himself in a reverie for Agatha, he catches himself and changes
the subject. We often see her from a distance: riding her bike while the
soundtrack swells romantically; gazing adoringly at Zero, carousel lights
haloing her face. She is a nearly absent presence in the story, by Zero’s
choice: a narrative door marked “Do Not Enter.” He won’t speak of her. It’s too
painful, and he’s too private.

His
need to share his story is keen (Zero approaches the Author, not the other way
around), but never so keen that he’s willing to open an abyss and gaze into it.
No matter how attentively Zero speaks or listens to his audience of one, some sliver
of his mind seems to be on that mountaintop, marrying Agatha under the
supervision of his ordained best friend who’ll soon be put down like a dog. He
keeps the hotel because it reminds him of Agatha. The painting—a cheeky vision
of innocence that he encouraged Gustave to steal, setting the film’s main plot
in motion—now hangs behind the concierge desk, and is featured on the backs of
the hotel’s menus, where every guest’s dining companion must at least briefly
regard it. Zero lives in the past. He invites the Author into it, but not too
deeply. Something in Zero is broken; he is in no rush to fix it, and nearly as
disinclined to explore it. Remembering is dangerous. He knows this. He helps
the Author understand this. It is a simple fact, certified, among many other
ways, by the theatrical shadows that darken Zero’s face as he prepares to
revisit the past.

The Grand Budapest Hotel is inspired, as a
closing dedication card informs us, by the works of Stefan Zweig. The Austrian
author fled his beloved Vienna as World War I ramped up and the continent
burned. He watched it spiral further into madness during the second world war,
then settled in Petropolis, Brazil, and took his own life, along with his
second wife Charlotte E. Altmann. His memoir The World
of Yesterday is a Proustian love letter to Vienna, the great city he
adored, then left because he couldn’t bear to see it soiled by anti-intellectualism
and thuggish tribalism. We see bits and pieces of Zweig represented in the
film’s story, setting ,and images (including the young Author, the old Author,
and Gustave, all of whom physically resemble Zweig in various ways), but as is
so often the case in Wes Anderson’s films, The
Grand Budapest Hotel comes at reality, historical and personal, in an
oblique and fanciful way. This Europe is no more “real,” in the Encyclopedia
Britannica sense, than the Rushmore Academy, the 375th Street Y, or Pescespada Island.
Yet the characters’ emotions are real, and their deaths feel as real as the
blood that spills from Richie Tenenbaum’s slashed wrists and clouds the water
near Steve Zissou’s wrecked helicopter. Anderson’s movies are filled with
personal abysses, and if the scripts tread lightly around them, it’s only
because the characters are living in them, and, on some level, we know it, and we
can feel it.

In this way—glancingly, discreetly—the
movie honors Zweig’s losses: of national identity, of youthful idealism, of
life itself. Fear of loss, and agonizing knowledge of loss, fuel the film’s
characters, as surely as it fuels motherless Max Fischer’s productivity and
distractedness, Mr. Fox’s reckless adventurism, and the Whitman brothers’
journey across India. In a wide shot of the hotel, we see that it’s built into
a mountainside and rises elegantly against it, but down near the bottom of the
frame is a hole, and spilling out of it is black coal that’s presumably fed
into the building’s furnaces. Loss fuels Zero, a man described by the Author as
the only person in the hotel who struck him as “deeply and truly” lonely, and
confirms that impression tenfold.

Why
does Zero speak to a young writer he meets in the baths? Why does he unburden
himself, to the extent that a polite and naturally reticent man could? Perhaps
it’s for the same reason that Steve Zissou makes films; that Max Fischer writes
and directs plays; that Jack Whitman writes short fiction; that Mrs. Fox paints
and Mr. Fox writes newspaper columns; and that Dignan chronicles a “75-year
plan” in his spiral notebook: to channel those unexpressed anxieties, give them
shape, and, ideally, master them—rather than be mastered by them.

But
also, and most importantly, to make sure that some part of each of them lives
on. The decay of the body is irreversible,. Death is non-negotiable. As
Professor Keating tells his students in Dead
Poets Society, someday, we’ll all be fertilizing daffodils. And then what’s
left? Stories. The Grand Budapest Hotel
treats storytelling itself as an inheritance bequeathed to anyone who’s willing
to listen, feel, and remember, then repeat the story, with whatever
embellishments are necessary to personalize it and make it mean something to
the teller. And so the story begins with a young woman visiting a statue of the
Author and staring down in wonder at the (nonexistent) novel that supplied the
story we’re about to see, a story set in (nonexistent) country that’s been
remade by war, a story told in a hotel that’s been remade by brute force
coupled with ideology, a story recounted by an Author who first heard it from a
lonely old man who finished his tale with what sounds almost like a
benediction: ‘I think his world had
vanished long before he ever entered it,” he says of Gustave, his mentor, his
father figure, his brother, speaking also of himself, and the Author who’ll
spin his yarn into literary gold. “But, I will say: he certainly sustained the
illusion with a marvelous grace!” Shortly thereafter, the elevator doors slide
shut like a book’s covers closing.

The
film’s final moments drive home the notion of stories as inheritances,
currencies, legacies, gifts. We see the old Author sitting quietly on a couch
beside his grandson. He’s wearing a version of the Norfolk suit he wore the
night that he spoke to Zero—a night that we now sense was one of the most
important he would ever experience—and he’s in a study (uncompleted, judging
from the half-painted walls in the room beyond) whose décor echoes that of the hotel,
circa 1968. His grandson is beside him. The old Author’s voice supplants the
younger’s: “It was an enchanting, old ruin—but I never managed to see it
again.”

Then
we return to the young woman in the cemetery as she closes the book and stares
at it. Perhaps she’s contemplating the larger meaning of the story she just read,
or re-read, and wondering what she’ll take from it, or do with it. Or maybe
she’s just thinking she wants to read it again, amid the tombstones. Life
destroys. Art preserves.

]]>
tag:www.rogerebert.com,2005:BlogPost/54da309dcd3b56dc1b0000652015-02-16T00:45:00-06:002015-02-16T09:20:20-06:00Terrence Malick's Cathedrals of Cinema: Excerpt from "Faith and Spirituality in Masters of World Cinema, Vol. 3"Matt Zoller Seitz

The following is my introduction to Faith and Spirituality in Masters of World Cinema, the newest volume in an ongoing anthology series about religion in movies. Edited by Kenneth R. Morefield and Nicholas S. Olson, it features a variety of pieces on filmmakers past and present. Most would more likely be described as passionate or perhaps "spiritual" filmmakers rather than explicitly religious ones, and as such, they've inspired some fascinating readings. Olson, for instance writes about paths to spirituality in the films of Asghar Farhadi, while Alissa Wilkinson contributes a piece on images of Eden in the films of Kelly Reichardt, and Andrew Johnson writes on "pain as a pathway to epiphany" in the work of Darren Aronofsky. It is a great honor to have been asked to contribute to a volume that gathers so many fine writers together in pursuit of such a worthy and elusive subject.--Matt Zoller Seitz

Devoted—or devout—moviegoers often describe the experience of seeing a film in a theater, with its communal response to an artist’s themes, images and “message,” as a quasi-religious experience. This is common even among viewers who have no experience with, or interest in, the traditions or the texts of organized religion, much less a belief in any particular god or gods. I suspect devoted is one way of describing the sort of contributor that Faith and Spirituality in Masters of World Cinema, now in this its third volume, attracts. For me—a critic who was raised among Mormons and Jehovah’s Witnesses, but whose own religious leanings tend more toward the agnostic or atheist end of the spectrum—cinema’s quasi-religious potency evokes feelings of awe, or reverence, for the mysteries of human experience that I’ve rarely felt in houses of worship.

One filmmaker in particular has captured—even sharpened—my attention in this way for years.

Instinctively, I wrote that in my 2005 New York Press review of Malick’s The New World, not realizing all the ways in which it was true. What I was trying to get at was the sense of wonder that the filmmaker evokes. Malick awakens this response quite strongly among those who respond to his work, and in my own admittedly anecdotal experience, I’ve found little difference in response between those who consider themselves specifically religious, generally “spiritual,” agnostic, or atheist. There’s something about the way Malick shoots, cuts and scores action—the things he chooses to show us or not show us; the things he considers significant—that evokes these feelings.

The biographical facts give us some insight, even if these alone don’t illuminate his artistry. We know that his parents were Assyrian Christian immigrants, that his name is one of the Names of God in the Qur'an—one that means The King, or the Lord of Worlds, or King of Kings. We know that he grew up in former Confederate states where derivations of Christianity dominate and the landscape is dotted with as many crosses as you’d find in Brazil. I’ve been told by people who know and work with him (he’s famously private) that since the 1990s he’s aligned himself with a benevolently evangelical strain of belief, and that his collaborators see him as a mysterious and obsessive but essentially kind guru who loves nature hikes and bird watching. We know that he’s always been preoccupied with phenomenology and with Wittgenstein and Husserl, and that at Harvard he studied under the film philosopher Stanley Cavell, a disciple of Martin Heidegger. We know that he became so enamored with Heidegger via Cavell that he spent a semester at Oxford studying with him, wrote his senior thesis on his work, translated his lecture “The Essence of Reason” from German, and after failing to finish his PhD, tried to teach a course on the philosopher at MIT.

However, none of these influences are so bound up with Malick’s films that the movies are impossible to enjoy without completing a reading list first. For all of his fascination with philosophy, history and theology, Malick’s art is primarily driven by picture and sound, much more so than most commercial filmmakers. Malick’s biographers seem to agree that filmmaking represented a continuation of his philosophical and spiritual inquiries by other means, and his cinematic inquiry has taken on a notoriously intuitive path. It’s impossible to “read” or decode Malick’s movies as if they were puzzles or riddles; one must instead enter into them, absorb them and in some ways surrender to them. But this way of describing the personal investment his films require is not to discount analysis; rather, it suggests that critique coming from some “objective,” arms-length perspective won’t begin to suggest the wealth of beauty and insight offered by his work.

For me, the wonder of Malick’s cinema is rooted in a concretely expressed humility that contradicts the tendencies of all but a handful of commercial narrative films. The standard model for screenplays is a three-act story in which a protagonist pursues some sort of goal. Everyone else in the story is judged in relation to the hero’s quest, and thus everyone is slotted into particular roles that are determined mainly by how much they help or hurt the hero, and how much screen time they get: the best friend, the love interest, the mentor, perhaps a villain and his or her henchpersons. This is what you might call the geocentric model of narrative, reinforcing our selfish and myopic wish to believe that life revolves around us, when in fact we’re but one of billions of individual planets in a universe whose center is mysterious, and whose rules remain inscrutable no matter how hard we try to understand them.

Malick never had much interest in the geocentric model of narrative, and over the decades he’s been increasingly pointed in his rejection of it. From "Badlands" onward the writer-director has made increasingly sprawling, swirling, visually and aurally collage-driven films. He’s become increasingly less interested in straightforward linear plotting and more inclined to ruminate, meander, and riff. This tendency manifests itself most strikingly in the way that Malick diminishes his protagonists. He often does this by reminding us that as emotionally overwhelming as life can be while we’re living it, we’re ultimately just intelligent mammals inhabiting the same ecosystem on the same small planet in the same unfathomably vast universe. The tension between the importance of individual desires and the indifference of society and nature fuels every creative choice he makes, and fosters that simultaneous, seemingly contradictory feeling that we’re on the outside and the inside of life at the same time, plagued by feelings of meaninglessness and hopelessness even as love and beauty reassure us that there is a point to everything—that all mysteries will be solved, all secrets revealed, somehow, some way.

When I think of Malick, the first images that spring to mind are from a sequence near the end of his 1978 film, "Days of Heaven." The film is a historical drama about a love triangle between two lovers posing as brother and sister (Richard Gere’s Bill and Brooke Adams’s Abby) and the rich but sickly farmer (Sam Shepard) that they try to ensnare to provide a better life for themselves and for Bill’s kid sister Linda (Linda Manz). Complications ensue: Abby’s pretend love for the farmer becomes real, Bill becomes jealous and leaves her and then returns, there’s a struggle in which the farmer dies, and the intrepid trio takes off again, only to be tracked down by Pinkerton detectives. Bill fires on his pursuers and is shot dead, falling face down in the water of the river where he and Linda and Abby had pitched camp. A shockingly abrupt cutaway from Bill’s face in the water—in extreme close-up—gives way to a series of images of Bill’s body floating downstream, then to the detectives lifting his corpse from the water and Abby and Linda weeping.

The most telling shot, though, is a wide shot of a group of children and adults on the riverbank, watching the detectives retrieve Bill’s corpse. All at once we’re torn out of Bill’s and Abby’s and Linda’s story, and thrown into a world beyond their troubles. We’ve just witnessed the end of a powerful love triangle climaxing in a man’s death by gunfire, but to the people on the riverbank, Bill is just a stranger who got shot that day at the river. We see this diminishing strategy again a couple of scenes later when Abby goes to a train station and watches soldiers boarding to go fight World War I. Europe has been in conflagration for years, it seems. The viewers, having spent most of the film isolated on Texas Panhandle farmland, were not aware of this. For most of the movie we had no idea of when, exactly, the story was taking place. When the seasons changed we didn’t know what year had ended and which one had begun.

Malick does this time and time again, in film after film: he’ll cut from a moment of extreme, often subjective personal trauma to a wide shot putting individual experience in a cosmic context, showing you a field of waving wheat or jungle grasslands or undulating ocean waves, or coral reefs and fish, or sunlight streaming through canopied foliage, or insects or birds or animals. As early as Badlands, Malick was using cutaways to ironically puncture his characters’ delusions of centrality—cutting from close-ups of the fugitives Kit (Martin Sheen) and Holly (Sissy Spacek) slow-dancing by the road at night to a wide shot reducing them to silhouetted cutouts slowly spinning in the beams of a park car’s headlights, or cutting from one of Holly’s romance fiction-modeled diary entries (read in Malick’s trademark voice-over) to rack-focus shots of tree branches and leaves and beetles.

"Days of Heaven" goes further still, showing the main drama (the love triangle) through the eyes of a barely adolescent girl who can’t fully understand what’s happening to her brother and his girlfriend, much less to the world they inhabit, and stressing the cyclical repetition of seasons, which obliquely suggest that the events we are witnessing will recur again, perhaps in a different guise—if not in these characters’ lives, then perhaps in those of others.

In his war drama, "The Thin Red Line," which has multiple narrators, the mortal distress of grunts ducking bullets or screaming in agony is often diminished, gently but firmly, by cutaways to close-ups of animals: a snake surprising a Marine in tall grass during a firefight, or a first-person point-of-view shot of a leaf perforated by the teeth of long-gone insects, the sunlight streaming through the green as if through bullet holes. The film starts with a close-up of a crocodile gliding into green muck, as if to remind us of the dinosaurs that predated our sojourn in a past so distant that we can hardly imagine it, and its final shot isn’t of soldiers or war but of a sprouting coconut poking through surf. “Why does nature war with itself?” one of the film’s many narrators asks, reminding us that we are a part of the ecosystem even as we trample or burn it.

Malick’s John Smith-Pocahantas drama, "The New World," has three narrators (though more often John, depending on which version you’re watching), juxtaposes the European settlers’ indifference to or contempt for nature against the natives’ deep connection with it, and presents the stories of both individuals and nation-states alike as hiccups on the world’s timeline, almost charmingly minor when considered in the shadow of tall trees soaring high above us, their branches creaking in the wind.

"The Tree of Life" takes this approach as far as it can, framing its wandering, ruminative story as the memory of one man, an architect, but also dipping into the consciousness of his mother and father and other characters, pivoting back and forth in time without warning, and sometimes slipping into fantasies or reveries that show seemingly uncanny or overtly metaphorical events: a child swimming through a room in which the laws of gravity have been suspended; the mother floating in air like the matriarch in Andrei Tarkovsky’s "The Sacrifice;" the architect visiting a desert plain on which dead loved ones have gathered.

The film’s oft-discussed, sometimes contentious, and certainly memorable creation sequence presents the architect’s life and the life of the human race collectively as the endpoint of billions of years of evolution. This seems, in context of Malick’s other films, like a way of gently mocking the geocentric model of drama, even as the film takes the characters’ pain and joy with utmost seriousness. It affirms the inescapable centrality of personal experience in each life while at the same time infusing that worldview with an awareness of the infinite breadth of time and space. Even his most recent film, "To the Wonder," practices this strategy of benevolent diminishment, imbuing shots of present-day suburban Oklahoma tract houses, ditches, and Sonic drive-in restaurants with a shimmering sense of possibility. The movie seems to detect a radiant, even holy beauty pulsing beneath or beyond the landscape that its characters often take for granted, and even contextualizes the movie’s longing for transcendence as a desire to get closer to God, or beyond ourselves (Javier Bardem’s ruminating priest serves as the mediator between the movie and us). We are not the centers of the universe, Malick’s films seem to suggest, but at the same time the storehouse of human experience is a given universe unto itself. This may be the essence of Terrence Malick: human beings are infinitely small and yet infinitely significant. Why? Because we ask why; because we wonder.

It’s this sort of meaningful and sensible contemplation that many people seek by reading scripture, meditating, or visiting houses of worship. They seek to lose themselves to find themselves, and to contemplate their significance within the wider scheme, however large or small that may be. I can think of few better places to turn than this, a compelling volume on faith, spirituality, and cinema, when looking for the meaningful and the sensible.

The wonderful people at "Bright Wall/Dark
Room" launched their February issue today, and it focuses on music,
including essays on “Nashville,” “Moulin Rouge!,” “The Sound of Music,” “Velvet
Goldmine,” “Evita,” “The Court Jester,” “We Are the Best!,” “Tous les matins du
monde,” and “The Music Man,” which we've excerpted below. Read more excerpts here and you can buy the magazine on your iPhone
and iPad here or sign up for
the web-based online version here. The illustration above is by Brianna
Ashby.

My father cries at parades. Especially at the
small town variety in which scouts march behind banners made of top sheets and
a junior high school band goes by in a clatter of excessive snare drums. At
these events there is usually a moment, at least once, when you can catch him
wiping away a few tears, grinning.

I spent half my childhood in a small New England
town whose top three claims to fame are all Revolutionary War landmarks, so the
opportunity to glimpse my father crying at parades while a piccolo whistled by
came at least a few times a year. There were other events that had this effect
on him too, mostly community theater productions, sometimes the Thanksgiving
Day high school football game. As a child, I mostly found it amusing that we
could giggle as a family at the parade-crying phenomenon – it made for a
comforting family shorthand, a way to demonstrate that we all knew each other
well. I also didn’t “get” it, and will admit that the parade-crying made me
slightly nervous, in that way one feels when one’s parents’ suddenly
demonstrate a mysterious interior life. I didn’t know what it was that could
tap so deep a well in my decidedly not weepy or wimpy dad.

It’s always been clear to me, though, what those
spectacles had in common: People practicing hard to get where they were.
Everyone in it together. And of course, music.

*

I knew that TheMusic Man (1962)
was Dad’s favorite film long before I’d ever seen it, which finally happened on
a day spent home from elementary school with a fever, swaddled in an afghan
with ginger ale and soup on a card table next to me. Though I’d heard him quote
it often, I had never been particularly drawn to the storyline. But a sick day
was an opportunity for Dad to give me some assigned viewing, and musicals were
a comfort to me. For years, just about the only movies I watched were Mary
Poppins and Peter Pan, both of which had been recorded for me by my
grandfather on an old VHS tape when they aired on TV. That tape became an
object both beloved and full of love, as I wound and rewound it over and over
again, never even skipping the commercials, as they too were part of the joy.

When people groan about musicals, as I’ve
discovered many of them do, they often drop the accusatory phrase: “And then
suddenly someone just bursts into song.” The complaint seems to be that
this feels inauthentic somehow, that it actually pushes the viewer away from
the story and into the role of skeptic. That things just don’t happen that way.

And yet time and again, upon winding and
rewinding, they do.

The Professor sells marching bands. He rolls
into places that are plagued by what plagues us (“River City ain’t in any
trouble,” says his friend when the professor first appears in the small Iowa
town to ply his trade. “Then we’ll have to create some,” he replies) and offers
a solution to all the town’s woes in the form of music, choreographed marching,
and sharp uniforms. Please observe me if you will, he says, I’m
Professor Harold Hill, and I’m here to organize a River City Boys’ Band.

After the Professor has instilled his
foundational fear in the townspeople and gathered them up to sell the cure, he
abruptly transitions away from singing of his phony credentials in the put-put
cadence the musical opens with (a beat that forges ahead through the entire
score, connecting one place to another like the train it emulates). Suddenly we
have a drumline’s rhythm and a brand new song, already familiar to me on my
convalescent couch — a story in the past tense, sung with the kind of
dreamy-eyed wonder than can only be found imbued in memory. The Professor
recalls -- performs, really -- the first time he heard this music: a day when
the greatest names in marching band history came to his town when he was young.

And so we’re dropped, right into that awe:

Seventy-six trombones caught the morning sun
With a hundred and ten cornets right behind…

*

There’s something about live music, more so than
other art forms, that makes me feel deeply impressed, the grandeur and power of
what people can do in groups displayed at its finest. I get this feeling
whenever a chorus sings in five harmonious parts, or a symphony saws away in
unison at a piece of centuries-old music: the feeling goes, we humans created this?!
Whether I find the music itself enjoyable or interesting is a separate matter.
It’s like standing on the steps of a cathedral; that it is a feat is
undeniable.

I can’t say I find parades to be such a feat
themselves, but I will allow that there’s something deeply impressive about any
group of people coming together and coordinating something so easily verging on
chaos. And there’s something uniquely moving in the air when they do it out of
joy, even if that joy is not exactly projected by sweltering adolescent
clarinet players. A parade is a joyful act, and it sort of flies in the face of
logic with its ultimate awkwardness.

Musicals, too, are often awkward. They’re such a
staple of high school life and community theaters that most attempts are doomed
to be mild and endearing catastrophes right from the start. That they can also
be performed expertly—without a seam showing, and with perfect pitch throughout
and set changes that barely rustle—only makes our stumbling through them in
auditoriums a few times a year all the more lovely.

The Music Man is about a marching band that cannot play, as so many plays and
parades and sporting events are about people who cannot fully do the thing that
they are there to do. But oh, what pride there is inherent in the trying.

*

When I was fifteen, I made my first and best ever
mix CD. I dubbed it, in self-conscious Sharpie lettering on its grey grooved
surface, “The Happy Sad Mix”. I remember explaining the title as “songs that
make you so happy you get sad, or so sad you’re kind of happy.” While
everything about this now makes me cringe with the fifteen-ness of it all, I
still stand by every track, and can’t imagine a more apt title. These songs
provoke the same feeling in me today, with the added wistfulness of remembering
those hormone-flooded late nights of CD burning, feeling like the only person
in the world who was still awake, the precise person to whom my music really
spoke.

I suppose that nostalgia is a word that could
more efficiently explain “happy sad”. But if nostalgia is the word for it, it’s
qualified by the fact that, to me, the particular nostalgia provoked by music
that I’ve loved is usually an ache for something that never was, or at least
something I have never actually experienced. This feels particularly true when
remembering the music of my teenage years – sentiments I would sing and quote
and copy into notebooks with the deep resonance of someone who had been through
much more heartbreak and sorrow than I ever did in my first couple of decades.
I went through a decent amount of both, but somehow I felt that the versions of
longing and loss described in those song lyrics were truer than the ones I
lived. So I joined my voice to the chorus and mourned all sorts of people and
places that I had never known.

Portuguese has an achingly beautiful word, saudade,
a not-quite-translatable longing for something that is gone and may or may
not return. It’s the “may or may not” that seems to defy translation – a part
of the definition that isn’t frivolously wordy, but rather contains the
ambiguity and wonder that is so key to the feeling.

In other words, the thing that separates saudade
from nostalgia is hope.

*

I must admit: the allegation that musicals are
inauthentic puzzles me. What I get in those bursting-into-song moments is more
like an overwhelming feeling of feeling. When sung, especially when sung by
many people all at once, everything that feels big suddenly becomes big.
It fills my stomach as it fills the room. It tugs at me in a familiar way.

It’s the feeling of late night, teenaged emotion
and yearning, and a palpable connection with the sound in one’s headphones, the
feeling that words written decades ago are coming from some place deep in one’s
own gut.

It’s the feeling of being a part of a group that
has worked hard and built something bigger than its members.

It’s the feeling of standing on the sideline of
a small-town parade and knowing -- maybe not knowing personally, but somehow
knowing -- all the people in it, and clutching one of those little flags
they hand out, and being there with my dad.

These moments of sudden music are actually
exaggeratedly authentic, so real that they’re nearly unrecognizable as the
inner monologues we go to such lengths to mask and keep inside at those times
in our lives when we just want to burst.

*

But nostalgia has its negative connotations,
too. The essayist Michelle Orange writes that “What we call nostalgia today is
too much remembrance of too little.” This accusation stings a bit for those
prone to the feeling, though most of us will quickly point it out when someone
more conservative lashes out against change and demands a return to purity,
order, and manners.

To sell his bands, the Professor must first sell
the idea of going back to a Golden Age that we know from the beginning probably
never existed. We know that he can’t teach music, and that he’ll never teach
anyone to march. We know that the people of River City are ridiculous for being
so easily mongered into fear, and for believing that they can ever buy back the
past. We also know that the past cannot possibly have been so golden, that it
was in fact a time of dust bowls and slavery and great depression.

We know and yet as we watch we yearn for the
promise of a band to be true, even while we hope that The Professor will be
caught red-handed and leave the people of River City to their changing times.

And then he starts to yearn for it to be true,
too. To lock down a girl, sure (there’s that going on, which I haven’t
mentioned, but you must have guessed) but also because, after all this time
hearing the story coming out of himself and filling the room with sound, he
wants to be able to touch it for once. His performative nostalgia turns into an
against-all-odds hope. Without realizing it, he had been joining his voice to
the chorus, joining River City in yearning and hoping for a time that he’d
never known either, though he’d sung of it so many times before.

*

This, then, is what musicals can do: they give
us a chorus of happy sad mourning for something none of us have experienced and
for which all of us are nostalgic, this version of the world in which people
burst open and beauty comes out.

At some point in my mid-twenties I started to
cry happy sad tears on a regular basis for the first time. It still makes me
feel refreshingly adult, like how I also acquired a taste for olives. It makes
me feel grateful that my dad showed me that crying at parades, or your parade
equivalent, is part of being a grown up—the more simple beauty you’ve seen in
the years you accumulate, the more it bowls you over. Now, the happy sad
feeling seems less like teenaged angst and more like a side effect of the
accumulation of wonder. Some of the wonder I’ve accumulated I’ve experienced –
no, all of it I have, in one way or another. How wonderful. How deeply
impressive, that we’ve experienced all that.

There were copper bottom tympani in horse
platoons
Thundering, thundering louder than before.
Double bell euphoniums and big bassoons,
Each bassoon having its big, fat say!

Horse platoons! Who
knows. What’s important is that this is a mighty return, an eternal reprise, a
dialogue with the past. It’s as if every song is lined up in front of another.
It’s as if we’ve been doing this forever, as if we keep getting better. At
making music. At being human. Thundering, thundering, louder than before.